This link on Berkeley “By the Numbers” states that 73 percent of undergraduate classes have fewer than 30 students.

That statistic is (painfully) amusing for me to think about, because I’ve only taken graduate courses here, and none has had fewer than 30 students. In my class reviews, I frequently discuss enrollment, so let’s recap:

  • CS 280, Computer Vision was overenrolled and had people sitting on the floor in Soda 306. The course staff had to force undergraduates to drop the course.

  • CS 281A, Statistical Learning Theory had one of the largest (if not the largest) rooms in Cory Hall, and we still had people sitting on the floor during the first few lectures. This is despite how CS 281A was offered the semester before I took it. Most graduate courses never get offered in consecutive semesters.

  • CS 287, Advanced Robotics. This is the only class where I can get a precise picture of enrollment in previous years, since the CS 287 course websites list the final project presentation schedule and I can count the students. (The Fall 2015 edition is on Piazza, not the official website.) The Fall 2009, 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2015 classes had the following respective number of students give project presentations: 19, 36, 15, 48, and 58.

  • CS 288, Natural Language Processing was overenrolled at the start; the professor said in his introductory email that “Since there are 80+ of you interested in what is normally a 20-person class, I wanted to be clear about how we’re planning to handle enrollment […].” Even with students eventually dropping, I am almost positive we had well over 30 students, possibly over 40 remaining at the end of the semester.

  • CS 294: Deep Reinforcement Learning was overenrolled and the staff moved the room and offered two lecture times. In theory, deep reinforcement learning is just one “small sub-research area” of Artificial Intelligence, but in reality, it’s probably the most popular of those areas.

  • EE 227BT: Convex Optimization was also quite crowded, though I don’t know if enrollment was that much greater than in previous years, but I don’t think having 50-60 students should be the norm in a graduate-level course.

It should be clear that this is due to the growing popularity of computer science as a major and a graduate degree (this page provides some hard statistics on Berkeley’s CS enrollment). The result is that Berkeley and similar schools have had to drastically expand the size of faculty and lecturers, but I worry about what will happen long-term if enrollment abruptly declines, say in five years. I wasn’t old enough to understand the dot-com bust, but I think I may need to go and read some of the literature on that era to have a better idea if history is repeating itself.